Fitness

Workout

This Simple Trick Will Shock You Into Working Out More

Simply quantifying how many times you worked out in the past week, month or year can give you an extra boost of motivation, according to Transform Your Habits author James Clear.

Clear is an author who writes about behavioural psychology, habit formation and performance improvement. He gives practical advice for integrating principles of behavioural psychology into everyday life. One of those areas is improving your fitness and commitment to working out.

Clear suggests that quantifying how often we have done something in the past – in this case, working out – can help motivate our next action. Noting how many times you worked out in the past month and just seeing that number written down can motivate you to beat that number in the next month.

So how often did you hit the gym in the past thirty days – once? 25 times? Zero?

“You know those ‘your speed’ signs as you’re driving down the road and there’s a little reader and it will show you the speed limit is 35 mph, you’re going 42 mph, or whatever, and it will put it up there. That sign is really just a feedback loop.

"It quantifies what’s happening, gives you an accurate measurement on where you stand, and you see it, so that is the feedback or the stimulus for your next action which is to slow down,” says Clear.

Research has shown that those "your speed" signs decrease driver speed by about 10% on average. The effects also stick with you for miles down the road.

Interestingly, signs like this continue to work. So if you pass one six months down the track, again you will decrease your speed by about 10% on average in response. Applying that idea to working out, if you note down how many times you work out at the end of the following month, that number will still have an impact on you.

“I think the measurement is a really key part of that. I think it’s important to quantify and measure the things that are important to you, so that those numbers can act as a trigger or stimulus for your next response.

"I don’t necessarily think that the one little practice of tracking how many workouts I do in a month or how much weight I lift in a workout is going to change my life entirely, but maybe that’s a 5-10% bump in my motivation or consistency. And if I can accumulate some of those bumps in areas that are important to me, it’s important that I spend the time to quantify and measure it.”

Photo: James Clear. Source: Supplied.

Keep the recording process simple.

You can quantify your workouts in a notebook or in the notes section of your phone and then simply tally up how many exercise sessions you did at the end of a time cycle of your choosing. Dealing with the actual reality of the number is different from thinking about how often you work out as an abstract thing; especially given the fact we typically tend to overestimate how much we have done.

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